Martin Scorsese's ("The King of Comedy"/"Raging
Bull") brilliantly jarring urban psychological drama
was inspired by Arthur Bremer's diaries of the
would-be assassin of George Wallace. Scorsese does
much more with this material, as writer Paul Schrader
thickly lays on it an underlying theme of sin and
redemption. On the surface it seethes with the rage
and fear the ordinary NYC citizen has of his world
turned screwy, and unfolds as critic David Kehr says
like a "thinking man's Death Wish (74)." Its arty and
plebeian touches are reasons it was both critically
acclaimed and also a smash at the
box-office--nominated for Best Picture Oscar, but lost
to the strictly plebeian Rocky.

Scorsese forcefully examines the seamy side of the
city at night with scenes such as: the cab riding over
the shooting steam coming out of the sewer manholes
(looking like something out of Dante's Inferno), the
filth and hustle around the neon-lit gaudy Times
Square, the desperate cabby chatter on their break at
the Bellmore Cafeteria on 24th Street, and the squalor
and human degradation of the Upper West Side tenement
buildings. It's an ugly and violent city framed on a
ghastly gothic palette, a city whose moral decadence
feeds on the mental instability of a loner taxi driver
who wishes that there was someone who would get rid of
the scum. The confused taxi driver comes to realize
that it's up to him to save the world from its fall,
as he arms himself with firepower and just like he was
asked to do in Vietnam he aims to make the world a
better place to live in by removing the
scum--believing he can't wait any longer for help from
the smooth-talking politicians.

An unsettled 26-year-old former Marine, Travis
Bickle (Robert De Niro), returning from Vietnam with a
sleeping disorder becomes a hack and volunteers for
the nightshift. He becomes increasingly more paranoid
as he witnesses a sweltering summer-time city overrun
by a street parade of hookers in hot pants, pimps,
druggies, drug dealers, two-faced politicians, angry
blacks, frightened whites and muggers. On the verge of
snapping Travis cries out "All the animals come out at
night." At another point he wishes for a "real rain"
to wash the "scum" off the dirty nighttime
streets.

The awkwardly social Travis searching for meaning in
his life acts on his yen for a pretty upstate blonde
presidential campaign worker, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd),
whom he fantasizes as someone pure and meant only for
him. Out of curiosity she agrees to a coffee date, but
angrily rejects him when he foolishly takes her on a
more formal date to a 42nd Street porno movie.

Travis is unable to connect conversationally with
the other cabbies who hangout at the Bellmore, not
even the philosophical know-it-all Wizard (Peter
Boyle). The loner can only communicate with himself
and is lost in his own hazy world. He not only writes
everything down in his diary, tells us what he feels
in a voice-over, but starts talking to himself. In the
film's much ballyhooed scene to indicate his
increasing madness, he converses with himself in the
mirror saying in a threatening way: "You talkin' to
me?" Building up his courage to go on another
dangerous mission, he gets one of the cabby hustlers
to introduce him to a gun dealer who unloads on him a
.44 magnum and three other smaller handguns. Travis,
at first, plans to knock off Senator Palantine, who is
running for president on the wishy-washy platform of
"We are the people;" and, is the one Betsy is
supporting. But when Travis accidentally meets a
12-year-old runaway turned prostitute, Iris (Jodie
Foster), his mission now becomes to rescue her from
"sin" and knock off her pimp (Harvey Keitel) and Mafia
handlers. Travis turns himself from a cowboy looking
hick into a Mohawk-wearing warrior, and follows up on
his credo that "No one's safe from the filth; we need
to clean the city."

De Niro gives a superb performance as the dummy
"everyman," who idiotically reflects the conservative
pledge to clean-up the country morally and hides his
racism by letting the other whites say what he's
thinking as he shines as the appealing innocent savior
of angelic white girls. In his disenfranchised status
after his service days are over, he goes from one
meaningless experience to the next hoping to find
something that's meaningful in his empty life--
choosing to drive a cab because he's too alienated to
fit into society in any other way. He's viewed as
someone not educated enough to know he's being used by
the corporate type of politician to fight their
battles, and he's conveyed through De Niro's
charismatic performance as someone who is to be pitied
when he becomes tossed aside like a bag of garbage by
those politicians he supported (think Bush and his
failure to provide more benefits for the wounded and
dead soldiers fighting in the Iraq War!).

De Niro gives his creepy character a life of his own
that defies that he's a whiny bitter man with a chip
on his shoulder, a sexist, a killer, a socio-path, and
an anti-intellectual.

Composer Bernard Herrmann's emotionally charged
thematic score added great fervor to the disturbing
nightlife scenes in the city. At age 64, Herrmann died
on the night after finishing the film's score.

It should also be noted that in order to avoid an X
rating, Scorsese was forced to desaturate the color of
the brutally violent climax and thereby receive his R
rating. Before that Scorsese changed on his own the
color of the men's skins that Travis kills from black
to white, fearing otherwise it might cause a riot for
his mid-1970s audiences.